Anxious families who have asked Walsgrave Hospital if organs were taken from loved ones who died in hospitals in Coventry may never be given answers.

Anxious families who have asked Walsgrave Hospital if organs were taken from loved ones who died in hospitals in Coventry may never be given answers.

A lack of records for old cases - some going back 30 or 40 years and relating to hospitals that no longer exist - means it's impossible to resolve some family queries.

It is more than a year since Walsgrave set up a helpline following Liverpool's Alder Hey Hospital scandal in which it was found that organs had been kept without consent.

A government survey revealed that more than 105,000 body parts and foetuses were being stored at hospitals in England, at least 16,000 of them illegally.

Over the past year a team of three at the Coventry hospital has been dealing individually with callers, trying to confirm whether organs or samples were taken from their loved ones.

Most questions have come from parents wanting to know if anything happened to their babies following miscarriage, stillbirth or post-natal death.

David Loughton, chief executive of University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, which runs Walsgrave, said: "We are moving to a point now where we are failing to satisfy the last few requests for information.

"The main reason is that there are no records available going back 35 years. I think one query was for as long as 47 years ago.

Andrew Shayler, director of clinical support services, whose department has been dealing with the inquiries, said: "We have had 283 requests for information. There is still a trickle coming in, although the bulk of the calls came last year when we set up our 24-hour helpline."

He said they had been able to deal with more than 200 of them.

He said some of the cases meant dealing with other centres where samples of tissue or other body parts had been sent for specialist examination.

It had taken time for these centres to carry out their own investigations and then inform the Walsgrave.

Mr Loughton added that support and counselling was offered both to families and to staff.

Walsgrave has only ever retained a very small number of organs, stored with consent or for forensic reasons.